Astronauts
by nothing-chan
Summary: How was Aoba supposed to word this to Clear? Clear who had two smiling moles below his mouth and two smiling eyes brimming with serenity? Clear did not feel things the way Aoba did, the way everyone else did, his brain functioned properly, with all of the connections steady and stalwart. His heart was a machine that pumped and worked, not something that he felt with, it never hurt.


_It would've been nice had you extinguished,_

_for my own sake,_

_only the unpleasant things that are from inside my head._

* * *

"Are you ready, Aoba?"

"I'm fine, are you sure it's okay for me to be wearing the helmet? I'll feel bad if you get hurt…"

Clear smiled with the fragrance of passing exhaust fumes.

"I'll be fine! I can't get hurt anyway."

The bike started to move before Aoba could think, tittering into motion with a forceful kick of the pale boy's foot. It was rolling and bouncing and traveling at the speed of light down a steep hill, a roller coaster rocketing them into oncoming traffic. Aoba's teeth jarred together and he could not even think to breath, caroming into the air with every assailing pebble, gargantuan pieces of grain popping up and pelting his arms, cutting at the fingers clinging desperately to the bicycle seat. Clear had not made a noise, but Aoba could see the stretch of a smile from the back of his wispy head.

The sweat poured down his cheeks, once only collecting at his head, and the salt made him thirsty, mouth scorched and withered.

"Aoba, you can hold on if you want," Clear tilted his face back toward the pallid boy, and Aoba did all but screech, legs trembling at the others lack of attention.

"Pay attention to the road! We'll die! Look out! Clear!"

A tree was swerved, and Aoba screamed into Clear's back, arms now encircling him continually, wrapping and wrapping until the viciously peddling boy could not breath.

Not that he needed to anyway.

The way home was littered with mountains of monstrous size and empty, wide turns. Aoba began to smell his own fear it was so rancid leaking from him. Why Clear felt the need to take every turn dangerously, jump every peak hazardously, fell deaf on Aoba's buzzing ears. The adrenaline sat packed at the ends of his fingertips, pricking his skin to the point of pain, wind slicing his eyes to tears. He was not scared anymore, but agitated, he had so much stuffed inside of him, all of this distress and excitement and wild feeling from sitting stolid against Clear. He needed to explode.

"We're almost there!"

Aoba lived by the sea, and the alkali air made his body ring more, a deep breath resounding inside his pored lungs and making his heart thrum regularly, familiarly, air lifting his elbows slowly. It started with a loosening of the fingers, a relaxing of the jaw, soon Aoba was balancing, arms free from strangling Clear and floating in the suspended air. Droplets of sea water kept his leaden fingers afloat, and Aoba began to smile, to laugh, newfound breeze collecting the nervous sweat off of his face and scattering it to the ocean.

The road was free from all cars, so Clear wound the bicycle to the middle of its sizzling pavement, hearing Aoba's trill in his ear, peddling faster and faster until the tires began to revolve so fast they let off a foul, burning stench. The howl of the whistling wind overpowered Aoba, so he closed his mouth, instead choosing to tilt his head back, air filtering into his helmet and bringing relief to his plastered hair.

The sky was an after-school neon blue, searing his retinas until Aoba was forced to shut his eyes, now drown out from everything except the bellow of the wind and Clear's warmth against his stomach. It was nice, to feel nothing but the softness of another and the simplicity of ocean air, but nothing nice ever lasted, and the bike began to slow, and the smooth road turned to rock, and Aoba opened his eyes, at home and standing on his porch holding a white helmet.

"Thank you for taking me home, though I did fear for my life at some points."

Clear's chronic smile faded to perplexity, hands receiving the sweat laden helmet being passed to him in embarrassment.

"Why? I thought you liked going fast? It looked like you enjoyed it…"

Aoba felt trapped, remembering the move he had pulled barely minutes ago, fingers still twitching from the aftershock of releasing the energy rammed inside them.

If Aoba had not done that, had walked home with barely any effort, he would have felt just as anxious, just as jammed as before. Life made him dizzy to the point where he had no idea what to do about it, it was frustrating. He could not just scream when he wanted, run until his legs fell out from under him, he was a grown boy with too childish of a heart.

Aoba could control things, keep them mature and speechless, but he could not get a hand over the vibrating inside of him. It was like a snake that was too quick, slithering away just as he lunged at it, sinking into his core and chuckling as it planted another seed of restlessness too abysmal inside of him to dig out.

How was Aoba supposed to word this to Clear? Clear who had two smiling moles below his mouth and two smiling eyes brimming with serenity? Clear did not feel things the way Aoba did, the way everyone else did, his brain functioned properly, with all of the connections steady and stalwart. His heart was a machine that pumped and worked, not something that he felt with, it never hurt.

"Besides, I wouldn't let you get hurt, Aoba."

Aoba stuttered a response, slid into his house, and took his shirt off immediately.

"Welcome home. I'm surprised to see you so early; did Koujaku give you a ride?"

His brother's voice was a soothing rill that smoothed his skin, hands ceasing their quaking and picking up the uniform he had dropped to the floor.

Sei was not the type of person who could make the tight ball bouncing around his hollow insides disappear, but he could make Aoba forget about it, which was something he had learned long ago and had come to appreciate.

Turning the corner, Aoba saw his brother on the sofa, shuffling a deck of playing cards idly.

"Grandma's out on a house call, care to play a game? You can pick which one. We could walk and get ice cream after, it is quite hot."

Aoba was too tired, far too tired to sit and keep his sagging eyes open any longer.

"I'm sorry, I need to study."

Aoba had never lied to his brother before, but he felt absent of all emotion as he trudged up the stairs, each step more difficult than the last. He kept his gaze to the wooden floor, knowing that if he looked Sei in the eye, his legs would falter right then and there.

* * *

When Aoba awoke, the moon was out; the stars were in full bloom. No one had woken him for dinner, most likely upon Sei's request, who had watched him haggardly worm his way upstairs, pathetically flopping onto bed and fleeing at once.

Aoba pushed himself up, saliva crusted to the edge of his mouth. He did not feel overwhelmed, nor did he feel tired, it felt more like nothing.

He was suddenly afraid; he was not used to feeling nothing.

Aoba pat his crinkled pants fervently, scraping out the cold metal phone that sat wedged in a collection of lint. The languidness of his nap sunk into his fingers still and they moved slothfully, unlocking slowly, dialing slowly, calling slowly.

There was one person who felt as drowned as he did, who could shove him in deeper until he did not even notice he was underwater to begin with.

* * *

Clear existed to make it go away, Sei to help him forget, and Mizuki to stand by his side. They had both figured out at a young age they thought the same, kicking a can across a dirt road and sharing stories and ideals with scuffed knees. Mizuki was the most human person Aoba knew, the most honest boy who admitted he was lost when he was, that he was covered in the feeling of thick regret, and a never ending appetite for an unexplainable something more.

He had not always been that way; he lied for quite some time, so long that Aoba began to think he was the only one who thought that way. Only when his best friend was decapitated in a drunken accident, metal of a car slicing barely half-way through his neck, leaving the rest to dangle and spurt all over Mizuki's paralyzed face, he began to tell the truth.

"People do anything they can to cover it up, act like they're content with who they, where they are, but no one is. It's spoon-fed into our mouths, you don't want anything. But I want something, everyone wants something, the thing is that nobody knows what it is. If we had a name for it, it would be all we would be selling, it would be all over the billboards and skyscrapers and flags hanging from the sky.

I guess the closest I can get to describing it is fulfillment, a feeling that we are satisfied and done with trying. But humans can never be satisfied, so we keep vibrating and running blindly until we hit a wall one day and splatter and break. That's the fate we all lead, it ends that way for everyone."

His hands had hit the steering wheel, sounding off the horn with an animalistic call.

"Why is that so wrong? Isn't that what we're supposed to do? Why does everyone want to act like they don't want anything more, like they're okay with an unsatisfying life? If we all stopped trying, we wouldn't get anywhere, we would all be stuck with stupid smiles on our faces.

I feel so empty like I need more all the time, but I'm so full. How do I describe it? Is that what we're looking for? A way to describe it? Or a way to stop it? Everyone wants to stop this constant churning inside of us, but instead we cover it up with miles of lies and leave it there to fester until it just explodes one day and we self-destruct like old robots."

Mizuki had started to cry after that, no tattoos covering up the scars on his face like they did now, tears pooling in the indents underneath his eyes.

"He tried to pretend he didn't want anything, and that's why he died. He wanted to die; he got drunk, he got in the car, because that was when his bubble of want finally spilled over, one he had tried to forget. I don't want to ignore it; I don't want to die without knowing what exactly it is I'm so strung up about."

They had been in a car then too, and Aoba had hugged his blubbering, newly born friend, shaken by his confession, filled with relief.

They sat in a car now too, but in silence, the world speeding by. It was too fast; Aoba preferred the bicycle to the rumbling metal beneath him.

"I heard you left school with Clear." Mizuki's voice was a jolly blade of bronze, hands dancing as he turned a corner lazily.

"He gave me a ride home."

"Don't do that, Aoba."

Aoba shot him a look filled with nighttime malice, a girl carrying midnight groceries on the sidewalk dropped her paper bag and scattered gallons of milk to the empty ground.

"Don't give me that look either."

"You don't even know Clear Mizuki."

"I know he's not human. Do you think he'll understand anything you try to say?" The tan boy pulled into a convenience store, parking far from the fluorescent lights.

Aoba already knew the answer to that, but he ignored it indignantly, hastily shoving his hands into his sweatshirt's pocket. Maybe what he needed was ignorance. Mizuki stayed silent, picking at a strip of skin on the side of his nail, blood bubbling over when he brutally tore it off.

Aoba did not feel better, in fact he felt more sullen than before. He could not tell Mizuki that he no longer felt the way he had before, that he had found just what he needed to quell the storm inside him, that he knew what it was that he had been searching for this whole time. Aoba finally felt 'fulfilled', something Mizuki, or anyone else, would never feel, as long as they sat pretending it did not exist, or chasing after something that would not make them feel how he did.

Aoba asked Mizuki to take him home before the boy in the driver's seat could try to hold his hand.

* * *

Aoba returned to Sei and a tepid cup of tea. A book sat closed next to his dark eyed sibling as they spoke, hushed and close to not disturb their sleeping grandmother.

"Mizuki says I should stay away from Clear, because he's a robot, he isn't human."

Sei tapped his paper fingers against the glass, humming in contented listening.

"I won't though, I need Clear now."

Aoba should have been embarrassed by his words, but he felt they needed to be said, to explain all of this to the millions of mitochondria listening and shaking their heads at him.

"But you can't leave Mizuki. You know how he feels."

Alone, desperate most of all. Aoba watched the steam filter out of his untouched tea as the words milled in his head.

"What classifies if someone is a robot or not? I mean, they're programmed sure, but we are too. We do things our brain tells us to do. We pick yes or no. Walk or stay in bed. He must have some sort of choice, if he's going to be human enough to interact with us normally; he has to have free will."

"I guess you're right." The blue-haired boy sunk with confusion.

"Why don't you just kill him? Mizuki, I mean."

Sei's perfectly polished cheekbones could cut the thin layer of glass between them, shattering the distance separating their tandem brains and making them one being. But Aoba was not Sei, so he shook his head, aghast at the suggestion.

"What?"

"I was just kidding!"

He was not, Sei had a twisted sense of justice, a cruel, confused mind, and Aoba was cemented to the seat as his brother stood, collecting the cups they had once been enjoying.

"That wasn't an answer you were programmed to expect, was it? I wonder if Clear would ever say that, or are humans the only ones capable of abstract free will?"

Aoba was afraid now.

"I'll shower first, okay? Be excited brother, it's Friday!" Sei bent down, raven hair slinking past his ear and tickling Aoba's face as he kissed the other boy, chaste and simple on his thin lips, "Grandma will be up to make breakfast soon."

* * *

When the two got to school, Aoba found Clear right away, head out a window, smiling up at a pecking bird.

"Ah, Aoba! Good morning!"

"Let's ride home together again today, Clear."

* * *

_Hello._

_The title and quote come from my favorite Hatsune Miku song, Astronauts. I also feel like the idea of space explains the feeling I was trying to get Aoba to explain in this story well. Space is so empty, there is so much, uh space in it, but there's also so much of it, it never stops growing. Sort of like the feelings of adrenaline, energy, wondering, and satisfaction that teenagers constantly have bottled up inside of them._

_I feel like Clear is so simple and innocent, a body of technology, he could help unravel Aoba and keep him facing forward, not back in confusion._

_Please review and have a good day!_


End file.
